Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 126

12 Christmas Myths (9&10): What's Green and Red All Over?

(9) The Holly and the Ivy–

All around the New York City area, the Christmas tree stands are stocked with little plastic-wrapped packages of holly. With its red berries and sharp, pointed green leaves, holly is another iconic symbol of the season. And one of the most lovely traditional Christmas carols is called "The Holly and the Ivy."

But once again, it is a fair bet that there was no holly and ivy hanging in a barn in Bethlehem. So how did these plants get associated with Christmas?

It...

Twelve Christmas Myths (8): Why 12 Days?

Today is the "reason for the season." The Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere will occur at about 12:47 pm Eastern Time. On the "shortest day," the Sun will "stand still" (the literal meaning of "solstice") at its lowest point in the northern sky and then begin its trek back towards the Northern world, bringing light and life with it as the days lengthen.
So while many of us call it the First Day of Winter, it is really the beginning of a "new year" and that's how the ancients saw it. ...

12 Myths of Christmas (7): How many "Kings?"

In churches around the world, there will surely be some Christmas pageants today, along with a reading of the Nativity story. When I was a kid, the Christmas pageant was probably my favorite day of the year. We put on the Christmas story and sang all the great carols. Afterward, there was a wonderful old-fashioned church dinner and a visit from Santa Claus.

There was only one perennial problem: The coolest costumes in the pageant were the gaudy flowing robes and jeweled crowns of the Three...

12 Myths of Christmas (6): Mistletoe and Kissing

So Mommy was kissing Santa underneath the mistletoe last night.

Surely, you've wondered why. What does a parasitic plant have to do with the birth of the baby Jesus?

Like other evergreens, mistletoe –a parasitic plant that attaches to other trees– remained green in winter, even as the trees in which it hung were "dead." A symbol of life in the dead of winter, it was part of the winter Solstice celebrations of many ancient cultures. The Greeks and Romans both prized it for its evergreen...

Christmas Myths (5): "Oh Fir Tree, Oh Fir Tree"

On my way to tape a Today show segment the other day, I passed the great tree at Rockefeller Center. As always, it was drawing a big crowd.

Gazing at this enormous and dazzling display of lights, I could only ponder anew an old question: There weren't any evergreen trees in Bethlehem. Why do people decorate Christmas trees in honor of the birth of Jesus?

Once again, we have the pagans to thank, as I've been describing in this series about Christmas and its mythic roots. In writing about the...

Don't Know Much About "a Lady"

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

So says Henry Tilney, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen's time as drugstore romances and "beach reads" are today. Novels, to high-minded nineteenth-century readers, were trashy and sentimental, and only filled women's heads with nonsense. Born on Deceember 16, 1775, Austen (d.1817) herself came...

Twelve Myths of Christmas (4): You Light Up My Life

Over the weekend, in Vermont, on a cold night lit only by the thinnest sliver of crescent moon, I was struck by the depth and inky blackness of the night. In a snow-covered world of bone-freezing cold and endless darkness, I was brought back to the idea of how this world must have seemed to people whose world was illuminated only by fire.

That idea is driven home by the fact that in 2009, the Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere will occur on December 21 at approximately 17:47 UTC...

Myths of Christmas (3): Who started the "War on Christmas?"

During the past few years, the so-called "War on Christmas" has been a staple of conservative broadcasters and the religious right. Their basic idea: Christmas is under attack by Grinchy atheists and secular humanists who want to remove any vestige of Christianity from the public space. Any criticism of public space devoted to religious displays –mangers, crosses, stars — is seen by these folks as part of an assault on "Christian values" in America. Mass market retailers who substituted...

The 12 Myths of Christmas-2

OK. I started this series the other day with St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. But here's the real first Christmas question: Why all the fuss over December 25?

For starters, the Gospels never mention a precise date or even a season for the birth of Jesus. How then did we settle on December 25?

If a bright light just went off in your head, you're getting warm. It's all about the Sun.

In ancient times, a popular Roman festival celebrated Saturnalia, a thanksgiving-like holiday marking the winter...

TODAY IN HISTORY: "A date which will live in infamy"

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
. . . The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I...